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Hamelman's Vermont Sourdough with increased whole grain-HELP PLEASE!

Hamelman's Vermont Sourdough with increased whole grain-HELP PLEASE!

Ok, so unless I have a moment of being a complete idiot, I think there is quite a mis-print in the amounts for this bread, under the home column.Anybody who has baked this bread and who can verify my math here would be helpful-I will write up what I come up with once it is baked. I just want to bake the BREAD!

Ok, so it is a 65% hydration dough with 11.2 oz of AP flour and 4.8 oz of rye flour-that would put the water at 10.4 oz, right?

Would you like a spreadsheet in grams to help with this? I hate using ounces. If you email me at tracy@doctracy.org I'll send you a spreadsheet designed just for the breads in this book. One for the sourdoughs and one for the straight doughs.

Tracy- you are angel! I will email you right.....I have been converting all that stuff into grams-my one petpeeve about the book; that the "home" section is not in grams.HAve you made this bread? It seems way off in the amounts........which if I REALLY REALLY read a recipe before starting I should have noticed,but alas!

I designed my spreadsheet so that you don't have to worry about holding back any certain amount of starter. His builds are great but I always get confused when I'm trying to figure out how the build goes into the finished dough. As I'm getting used to the book, I'm getting the hang of how he wants you to do it but at first I found that extra bit of starter confusing.

So, remember to keep out some starter because it won't be in the build or final dough. My spreadsheet assumes that you maintain your starter seperately.

I'm at work and don't have the book with me, but I mixed the Hamelman VT sourdough last night and recall the home formula calls for 24 ounces (1 pound, 8 ounces) of bread flour, plus the rye. Water was 14.8 ounces (but don't quote me). I goofed and added all of the levain instead of holding back an ounce; will see what it looks like when I pull it from the cooler after work.

Am pretty sure the formula which uses whole wheat is the same, except it substitutes WW for the rye. Will check tonight.

A futher note: this formula is my everyday bread. It has never failed.

Thanks Lindy! I am making the one on page 156, though and it has different proportions. I will try and figure it out at some point today-possibly with the help of the spreadsheet! But at this point I will be making a small loaf, since I went with the 11.2oz bread flour plus the 4.8 oz rye flour...which gives a way small dough yield than the stated 3lb 5.4 oz............

It will be interesting to hear how the bread comes out. If I understand you right, you've got 11.2 oz bread flour (70%), 4.8 oz rye (30%), 10.4 oz water (65%), 0.6 oz salt (3.75%). Good thing you re-calculated the water! Looks like you had a sticky loaf of rye. Did the high salt level affect the rise time?

well, i halved the salt. this will be called "flying by the seat of my pants vermont sd......"

i shall make a blog post once it is done. sheesh, if it turns out it will be a miracle!

so to recap-since i never posted this orginially. i started the levain at night-was lazy and went by the cup measure(this if the first time i went by cup measure and it is off! therefore created a stiffer levain and it also means there is a huge amount of pre-fermented flour),then this a.m. realized how wonky things are and proceeded with guesstimating the remaining flour/water ratio-trying to approximate that 70%BF,30%RF and 65% H2O pus .3 oz salt. I can tell you already, I used more water, since the dough seemed not of medium consistency at all going by those ratios! Have tasted the dough and it does not seem too salty.......

I think the overall bread flour amount in the home recipe is off: instead of 11.2 oz total bread flour, it should be 1 lb 11.2oz (6.4 oz levain + 1 lb 4.8 oz final dough).

You can see that the overall ratios don't add up (11.2 : 4.8 is not 85:15), and the ingredients in the overall recipe are a pound short of the 3 lbs 5.4 oz total needed for 2 large loaves of 1.5 lbs each.

Would it be very forward of me to ask if I could have your spreadsheet too? I have a scale that converts from ounces to grams and I usually write out the numbers by hand as I go through, but I get into a terrible muddle with these formulae sometimes. I love working with this book but it is hard sometimes, especially when you are used to grams.

Please do. Why do all the work when there's something out there better? I have a scale that converts too but I don't always want to make 3 loaves of bread. Trying to divide 1lb 12 ounces into 3 is just crazy instead of asking the spreadsheet to make me a 1,000gram loaf of bread.

Thanks to all you friendly helpers! The bread is done, cooled and cut. Tastes amazing-looks miles substandard partly because some super dufus(me) decided to stick it in a loaf pan, due to its high rye content and the rye-y feel of the dough...........when will I learn to trust my starter?

Anyways, the rest of my day followed the same prinicple as the recipe-just kinda off......so maybe it was in the air.

When I get back from my mini-trip I will post picture and write a blog entry.

It's the taste that matters. I kept baking pretty batards and boules. One day my husband said-can you bake these in loaf shapes? They'd be really good if they were shaped like regular loaves. So now I'm baking in loaf pans. Most everything. At least until I get into the house where I have a full size oven and can experiment with a stone and various methods of covers/steams.

You know, EVERY SINGLE bread I put into a loaf pan ends up with a nasty crack looking thingy on the side. Mini had a good idea about it when I posted about a similar problem with a rye bread(cutting and pasting here)

"About the crack. I think a combination of the wetness of the dough and the weight is falling over the edges of the pan. The heat sets the crust and the loaf keeps rising as the set crust floats causing the crack. Maybe you need a bigger pan or a smaller recipe or a slightly dryer dough."

Did I learn? Nope! But yeah, the taste is really quite lovely! I have never made a bread with bread flour and a large rye percentage-it is really nice and just the right type of bread for my husband. I can't wait to make a REAL Vermont SD ,though, like I set out to......Oh well, next week maybe!

I think a quick solution to your problem is to stop using the "Home" column in the Hamelman recipes and instead look to the metric equivalents in column 2, converting the kilograms to grams. All you have to do is move the decimal point two places to the right for all weight values -- very easy.

For instance, for the levain build, it's 150 g bread flour instead of 1.5 kg; 188 grams water instead of 1.88 kg; and 30 grams mature culture instead of .3 kg. It's one of the great advantages of using metric. I end up with two decent sized loaves using these measurements.

Thanks Barbara, excellent idea! For the recipes I checked out that means one ends up with a bit more dough yield than is written in the home column, but it doesn't seem to be a large difference. I love metric,so much easier to use one tenth of the commercial metric column than converting the ounces into grams.

At least you were smart enough to figure it out by yourself-thanks for the tip!

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